I have joined the _Times_ Book Club. I find that I cannot get along without a constant supply of new books. I want to keep abreast of modern thought at all costs. I don't see why, because I am condemned to teach Descartes and Pythagoras, I should deny myself Henry James or Bourget. I find that standard works are not enough. There are times when Pope palls on me, when Dickens and Thackeray ask to be given a rest. At such times I want to read some of the new school, the men who have broken away from the old traditions and carved out a new world. Perhaps if I were not in such a deadly fear of getting into a groove I should not pin my faith so largely to these very restless and rather morbid young men, but a schoolmaster seems to be expected to stifle any growth that a nation might be showing signs of, to prevent youth from essaying out of the beaten tracks into the many virgin jungles that surround life. This term so far is going fairly smoothly. We have a new German master who gets unmercifully "ragged"; O'Connor looks upon him with extreme suspicion. He thinks that the German Government have sent him here purposely to spy out this part of the country. A more harmless fellow than Koenig it would be hard to find. O'Connor really is a prodigious ass. In the first place the man is very nervous: he has no idea of keeping order. Boys have a habit of entering his classroom by the window; they also burn bonfires in his waste-paper basket; they bring mice into form and chase them all over the room; they cheer when any boy gets good marks and hiss when any one fails to score. Altogether his sets derive a considerable amount of amusement from him and we in Common Room profess to be shocked but are in reality secretly pleased to think how infinitely superior we are to him. Nothing gives a man self-confidence so quickly as to see another one making a havoc of his job. Benson is also getting "ragged," not so much by the boys as by some of the younger members of the staff. Last term we started a club which meets nightly in his rooms and "rouses the welkin with a succession of catches." We drink whisky and consume vast quantities of fruit and cake, while he plays to us on the piano or violin and we shout snatches from the latest musical comedy. Benson's forte lies in the subject of boys' smoking. He is certain that boys use the music-rooms to smoke in. To encourage him in this idea, several of us have lately dropped cigarette ends in different parts of the building; these he discovers, picks up and treasures, revealing them to us later. He has a wonderful scheme (which he thinks is his own but which in reality we have put him up to) by which he means to catch the miscreants red-handed. Half of the club are to sit in darkness and silence in one room, the other half in another: we are all to listen until we hear the boys come in, and at a given signal dash out upon them from two directions and so catch them.